* The SA government and Labor politicians therefore blames the Australian Energy Market operator for not having directed Pelican Point to go fully online. The authority (if not them, then someone) tried to blame the government for not telling it via an emergency direction to turn on the generator. (The government responds that realising a forecast high temperature does not count as an "emergency" - and that seems more than a reasonable argument.)

* The Federal government, up to and including Turnbull, has politicised the blackouts to an extraordinary and quite sickening degree: using it as an opportunity to deride renewable energy and promote coal as it if is a magic elixir, instead of the more obvious question - how do you make a system that already has adequate capacity use it to avoid brown outs.

* Ross Gittins wrote a plain speaking article a few days ago explaining what lots of people have said - the core of the current problems revolve around government policies regarding gas. Here's Gittin's conclusions:

Turnbull blames South Australia's blackouts on its excessive enthusiasm
for renewable energy which, pending the development of storage
arrangements, has a problem with intermittent production.

He doesn't admit his parity-pricing policy is contributing. It was
expected that gas-fired power generation would ease the transition from
coal-fired to renewable generation.

That's because gas-fired power stations emit far less carbon dioxide and
can be turned on and off as required to counter renewable energy's
intermittency.

Guess what? South Australia has a new and big gas-fired generator at Pelican Point, near Adelaide, but it's been mothballed.

Why? Because the operator had a long-term contract for the supply of gas
at a price set at the pre-export-parity level, and decided it was more
lucrative to sell the gas into the East Asian market.

Last week Turnbull had the effrontery to argue that now gas-fired power
had become uneconomic, we needed to fill the gap by subsidising
new-generation "clean" coal-fired power stations.

Small problem. They're hugely expensive, only a bit less
emissions-intensive than existing coal-fired stations, can't easily be
turned on and off, and would supposedly still be operating 60 years
later.

If there's a case for subsidising any fossil fuel-powered generators the
obvious candidate is the gas-fired plants the feds' export-parity
pricing policy has rendered uneconomic.

So great is the coal industry's hold over the Coalition that, not content with subsidising increased supply
of coal from Adani and others at a time when coal is a sunset industry,
Turnbull is now making up excuses to subsidise increased demand for coal by local electricity producers.

Economists are always telling politicians not to try picking industry
winners. In reality, the politicians are far more inclined to back known
losers.

I cannot see any flaw in the argument in the highlighted paragraph.....

And finally: maybe I am not reading widely enough, but has any journalist or commentator explained more about what's behind the Turnbull/Frydenberg/Morrison rapid new found love affair with coal? It seems kinda suspiciously like they are responding to intense behind the scenes lobbying that the public might not be fully aware of ...